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sparxsystems

Sparx Systems

99 Albert Street

Creswick,

Victoria

3363

Australia

P: +61 3 5345 1140

F: +61 3 5345 1104

Sparx Systems specializes in high performance and scalable visual modeling tools for the planning, design and construction of software intensive systems. A Contributing Member of the Object Management Group (OMG), Sparx Systems is committed to realizing the potential of model-driven development based on open standards. The company’s flagship product, Enterprise Architect, has received numerous accolades since its commercial release in August, 2000. Enterprise Architect is the design tool of choice for over 300,000 registered users world-wide.

Enterprise Architect 11 will be a ground breaking, major release of Sparx Systems' award-winning modeling platform. With so many exciting enhancements in version 11, we want you to see why this release makes your modeling more productive than ever!

Join Tom O'Reilly and Ben Constable from Sparx Systems as they preview the release highlights:

New tools that help business analysts work faster.

Enhanced analysis and design tools for software and systems engineers.

If you are considering Enterprise Architect or you are a first time user, this webinar is for you.

Discover the visual power of the modeling environment as we walk you through the basics, show you tips and tricks that will speed up the modeling process and share useful resources to help in your daily modelling activities. Discover how you can rapidly access the modeling power of Enterprise Architect and have your questions answered live, by a product expert.

Sparx Systems is proud to announce this new initiative to help Enterprise Architect users. If you have recently downloaded the Trial or are new to Enterprise Architect, we would encourage you to register Today.

In the rapidly changing world of aviation, standards are the measure by which successful transition from the norm to the new can be made. Over 60 years, IATA has developed the commercial standards that built a global industry and its mission is to represent, lead and serve the airline industry. With a membership made up of 240 airlines, among them the world's leading passenger and cargo airlines, IATA represents 84% of total air traffic.

Passenger numbers topped the 3 billion mark in 2013 for the first time, with the value of goods carried as air cargo totalling one third of world trade. Passenger and Airport Data Interchange Standards Board - or PADIS is a set of working groups responsible for the maintenance of technical specifications such as XML schemas in support of various business standards maintained by IT experts who can turn business standards into precise technical specifications that systems need to communicate.

It is against this industry backdrop that IATA has chosen Enterprise Architect to build the Aviation Industry Data model. The data model will enable interoperability across the entire spectrum of services providers and agents, who work with airlines to provide a seamless travel experience.

The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is the industry's leading enterprise architecture framework. TOGAF contains numerous best practices and a proven method for establishing an architecture capability and developing architecture content. This webinar will show you how to use Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect to implement a TOGAF-based Architecture Repository, including: the Architecture Landscape, Standards Information Base, Reference Library, and Architecture Metamodel.

Mr. Armstrong is a co-chair of the TOGAF Certification Standing Committee (CSC) and EA Capability Improvement project, was a significant contributor to TOGAF 9, and is contributing to the next version of TOGAF currently under development. Mr. Armstrong is certified in TOGAF, ArchiMate, Open FAIR, UML, and SysML.

The webinar will be held on the 19th and 20th of March. Check the registration page below for local times.

The proliferation of location based services in banking, finance, energy, health, entertainment and many other industries, makes geographic data more valuable than ever! To store and manage geographic data, many organizations rely on Esri's ArcGIS geodatabase.

How can you use state-of-the-art modeling tools to design and document these geodatabases? How do you link and trace existing geodatabases with other parts of your corporate model? Senior Analyst at Sparx Systems, Ben Constable, will answer these questions and demonstrate the design of an ArcGIS geodatabase in Enterprise Architect.

Two live sessions will be conducted to accommodate attendees in different time zones on the 25th and 26th of February.

According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in 2013, there are almost as many mobile-cellular subscriptions as people in the world and in 2014 the number of mobile phones in use will exceed the number of people on the planet. The mobile revolution is providing equity of access to education, health, government, banking, environment and business for many sectors of the global community while challenging enterprise business models in every sector. It is a platform that is here to stay and a disruptive influence on business that cannot be ignored.

Mobile devices form the platform that will deliver work models that are very different from the past and facilitate social networking. This force will inform the enterprise architecture that will deliver strategic support for mobile devices owned by employees and provide open, secure environments to allow these devices to connect to enterprise systems including the cloud. At the Gartner AADI event in December 2013 one of the key takeaways was that “SOA is more critical than ever. The age of the monolithic application is over. An agile, multidimensional approach to architecture is absolutely essential to support continuous development and innovation. Give developers the tools to fail fast, iterate quickly and innovate for businesstransformation.”

By defining an envisioned future state that can be shared and discussed enterprise architecture will assist organisations to navigate change in an agile manner while enabling milestones to be achieved within agreed timeframes. A key standard for enterprise architecture is the use of UML for creating design models. Based on the Object Management Group’s (OMG) Unified Modeling Language (UML), Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect enables SOA project teams to capture ideas, concepts and designs using industry standard notation. Enterprise Architect also leverages UML Profiles to provide domain-specific modeling capabilities for the broad set of roles within SOA practitioner base. See http://www.sparxsystems.com.au/platforms/soa.html

Enterprise architecture is about ensuring that an organization has the right integration/alignment between IT and the business (including people, processes, investments, information and technology) in order to better support the business's capabilities and to enable the business to evolve toward a future state, according to Gartner. “It is not just about technology. Enterprise architects facilitate the process to define a "future state" for the enterprise (requirements, principles and models) so that they can identify gaps between that future state and today's capabilities. Only by doing this can an investment portfolio be planned, to fill the gaps that exist between the future state and the current state. Ultimately, the business value of EA resides in these gaps being clearly identified and thoughtfully filled via appropriate, well-engineered programs.”

The success of business models lies in their agility, the extent to which they adapt to changing market conditions and how they maintain efficiency and competitiveness in international supply chains. Today markets are changing at an unprecedented pace, driven by mobile, social, cloud and data technology.

IDC states that “by 2020, a third of the data in the digital universe (more than 13,000 exabytes) will have Big Data value, but only if it is tagged and analysed”

In an ideal world, large enterprises want to be able to respond to market change, with the speed of smaller competitors. This agility lies in the organisational ability, to create innovation cycles at the technology, people and process levels- the development of new applications based on insights crystallised, from the effective collection, management and analysis of data. These cycles have the potential to continually drive, innovation and solutions.

An Enterprise Data Architecture identifies the strategic data requirements and the related components of the information management solution at the enterprise level, and supports the ability to leverage data into business intelligence.Such architecture informs organisation strategy and provides a formal approach to creating and managing the flow of data and data processing across IT systems and applications. This includes defining objectives for the improvement of data collection and use, process improvement, effective decision making on new and modified solutions, data warehousing, integration and reporting initiatives.

Gartner recommends that “enterprises should adopt a portfolio of data integration tools that support a range of data delivery styles” including “federated and virtualized views of data.” It is recommended to take into account both existing data integration processes and future needs relative to a range of use-cases including data warehousing, operational application integration, system migrations and data conversions, and intra-enterprise data sharing.

Organisations or complex adaptive systems share a common characteristic. They are self organising and have the ability to learn, adapt, and differentiate themselves from other self organizing systems.

The strength of this characteristic is about to be tested in the face of an imminent and challenging period of disruption that Gartner calls the Nexus of Forces. The forces of this Nexus are Mobile computing, Social collaboration, Cloud and Information (Big Data) and it is predicted to create unprecedented change.

Good information management practice has always been the basis of competitive advantage and resulting business success, but the big advances that innovation creates also means big change. This is unfamiliar and uncharted territory and effective navigation and management, is a matter of survival.

Today, information is a strong currency and an inability to leverage information across use cases, roles and organizational structures, can mean an undiscovered El Dorado of value. Governing, managing, storing and analysis of information that is centralized and decentralized is critical to success.

For innovation to grow and to avert the risk of creating new information silos, good business triage is essential. A clear view of information capabilities and management solutions that are consistent for sharing and reuse, will mean greater business value. Engaging as many aspects of the organization as possible in problem solving, depends on the flow of ideas and the socialization of people, who would otherwise be siloed.

Organizational theorist Ikujiro Nonaka suggests innovation comes from serendipity. Knowledge is not created by information processing, but is created by “tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insights, intuitions, and hunches of individual employees and making those insights available for testing and use by the company as a whole". Organizational silos are the nemesis of serendipity.

Gartner in its 2013 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools recognized Sparx Systems, for the fourth year running. Our user base tells us that Enterprise Architect has allowed them to take unprecedented control of planning and development and to make corporate decisions that fully integrate the wisdom of both business and IT leaders and stakeholders. For more detail on how Enterprise Architect supports the organisation in addressing major disruption, please refer to the Whitepaper.

Using the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle from the previous blog, we inferred the necessity of technology to tame the complexity of a system that is in a state of constant change but which nevertheless must be managed and guided such that it meets key objectives at the individual and enterprise level. The major problem is that jigsaws never come with instructions on how to build order out of chaos – and the individual approach is usually random, based on trial and error!

With any project, be it building a house or fixing a washing machine, a manual is essential. To have any chance of arriving at a destination when setting out into unknown territory, it is wise to have a plan or a map. Without these instructions one can lose track or get completely lost. In the enterprise, when teams lose the focus of project objectives, this translates as financial loss or project failure.

Similarly, a Use Case is a documented record that describes a procedure for interaction with a system and when these records are collectively available they stimulate discussion, which generates ideas for improvements and efficiencies. A Use Case approach forces the consideration of users and customers, which can help elicit feedback and create a dialog to help build better systems. The interaction or cooperation generated creates added value. These records provide transparency, agreement and shared awareness, acting as way markers in a broad landscape of procedures that are foreign to many, as individual knowledge is often siloed.

Although Use Cases are valuable and provide a positive return on investment in time and resources, their development is also takes time. For many different teams however, they lay a foundation for future reference. Enterprise Architect is an indispensable, time saving tool in the Use Case development process.

In mid 2013 Sparx Systems conducted a webinar showcasing model driven development of Use Cases. This informative session reviewed the rich features of Enterprise Architect that can assist in the key processes of analysis, development and testing, saving time while replacing random processes with best practice and creating consensus and clarity between stakeholders.